Sumner Ferris, Chaucer Scholar and Medievalist
Sumner J. Ferris was an internationally ranked Chaucer scholar. He was an accomplished medievalist, career professor, and sometimes-administrator. He was also my dad.
Ferris spent most of his academic career at an obscure Pennsylvania state school called California University of Pennsylvania (formerly California State College; he was instrumental in completing the paperwork and planning to upgrade from college to university). He was not a doctor, and he never tried to leave for a bigger school where he’d be less comfortable. Once I asked him why he never went through the formality of being certified as a Ph.D. He smirked and said, “Who would question ME?”
Dad could list all the monarchs of England in order. Not because he had memorized them. He had simply pieced it together over the course of his studies. He was the kind of professor who helped students accomplish things they once thought impossible, and one told me she named a child after him.
The spotlight moment of pops’ career took place in 1977/1978, when he noted numerous acts of unattributed quotation/paraphrasing by English-major icon John Gardener, author of novel Grendel and manifesto On Moral Fiction. Newsweek wrote a story about it. (Click HERE for a larger version.)
Dad graduated from Harvard the same year as John Updike, who was one of my dad’s favorites, though they weren’t friends.
Sumner J. Ferris died in 1997.
Following is a list of dad’s publications and such, from his CV. When I get a minute, I will pull them together into a book one day. (6623 Press needs interns, if you’d like to work on it.) In the meantime, if you’re into this kind of thing, maybe take a look at his life’s work and see if there’s something you could use.
Please pardon the incomplete formatting; dad would not approve. I will fix it later, if time permits. But I’m working on something I need to finish. And, as a quote attributed to my him prescribes, “No work is more important than one’s own.” This is what pops accomplished in his career. And I want to make sure it’s out there.
SUMNER FERRIS PROFESSIONAL PUBLICATIONS AND RELATED ACTIVITIES
Review of Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (1992). Forthcoming in Studies in the Age of Chaucer.
"Venus and the Virgin: The Proem to Book III of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde as a Model for the Prologue to the Prioress's Tale." Chaucer Review 27 (1993): 252-59.
Contributing Bibliographer, "Annotated [Annual] Bibliography of Chaucer Studies," 1979-1990, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3-14 (1981-1992); and thus to Lorrayne Baird-Lange and Hildegard Schnuttgen, A Bibliography of Chaucer, 1974-1985 (1988).
Co-editor, The People of Southwestern Pennsylvania. California, PA: California University of Pennsylvania, 1991.
Review of Chris Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the King's Affinity (1986). Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988): 150-52.
"The Wilton Diptych and the Absolutism of Richard II." Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 8 (1987): 33-66. Delivered, in briefer version, to the Medieval Colloquium of the Lehigh Valley, Cedar Crest College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, March 12, 1984; and, in somewhat different form, as "Painting and Politics in the Fourteenth Century: The Wilton Diptych: An Illustrated Lecture" to the Faculty Forum, California University of Pennsylvania, April 28 1988.
Review of Lorrayne Baird-Lange and Hildegard Schnuttgen, A Bibliography of Chaucer, 1974-1985 (1988). Literary Research 12 (1987 [sic]): 215-18.
"Toponyms, Surnames, Titles and Cognomens: With Special Reference to John of Gaunt and Henry of Lancaster." Chaucer Newsletter 9 (1987): 1, 4.
Review of John Leyerle and Anne Quick, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Introduction (1986). Literary Research 11 (1986): 65-67.
Co-editor, Southwestern Pennsylvania, Nos. 1-6. California, PA: California University of Pennsylvania, 1981-1986.
"John Stow and the Tomb of the Duchess Blanche." Chaucer Review 18 (1983): 92-93.
"'His barge ycleped was The Maudelayne': Canterbury Tales A 410." Names: Journal of the American Name Society 31 (1983): 207-10.
Review of J. J. N. Palmer (ed.), Froissart: Historian (1981). Studies in the Age of Chaucer 5 (1983): 183-87.
"The Prioress's Tale as a Painting." Paper delivered at "Chaucer at Albany II," State University of New York at Albany, November 6, 1982.
Review of Joseph Gibaldi (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" (1980). Literary Research Newsletter 7 (1982): 170-71.
"The Mariology of the Prioress's Tale." American Benedictine Review 32 (1981): 232-54.
"Chaucer at Lincoln (1387): The Prioress's Tale as a Political Poem." Chaucer Review 15 (1981): 295-321.
Review of Charles R. Young, The Royal Forests of Medieval England (1979). Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 (1981): 185-88.
"Chronicle, Chivalric Biography, and Family Tradition in Fourteenth-Century England." In Chivalric Literature: Essays On the Relations Between Literature and Life in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Larry D. Benson and John Leyerle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980: 25-38, 153-55. [Also in the series, Studies in Medieval Culture, XIV, Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute of America, Western Michigan University.] Delivered at Conference on Medieval Studies, the Medieval Institute of America, Kalamazoo, May 4, 1976.
"A Hissing Stanza in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen (Helsingfors) 80 (1979): 164-68.
Distinguished Faculty Award, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 1979.
Review of John Gardner, The Life and Times of Chaucer (1976). Speculum 52 (1977): 970-74. [See Peter S. Prescott, "Theft or 'Paraphrase'?" Newsweek, April 10, 1978, p. 94; cited in Richard D. Altick, The Art of Literary Research, 3d ed. (1981), p. 270.]
Note on a modern analogue of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. Chaucer Review 10 (1976): 170.
Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Seminar, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., "The Realism of Romance," Larry D. Benson director, 1975.
"Chaucer, Richard II, Henry IV and 13 October." In Chaucer and Medieval Studies in Honour of Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. Beverly Rowland. London: Allen & Unwin; Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1974: 210-17.
"'Gunsell' and 'Gooseberry Lay' in Dashiell Hammett." American Notes and Queries 10 (1972): 70-71.
"The Sources of The Maltese Falcon." American Notes and Queries 9 (1971): 88.
"'Wades Boot': Canterbury Tales E 1424 and 1684." American Notes and Queries 4 (1970): 71-72.
Review of Beryl Rowland (ed.), Companion to Chaucer Studies (1968). American Notes and Queries 7 (1969): 77-78.
"The Date of Chaucer's Final Annuity and of the 'Complaint to His Empty Purse.'" Modern Philology 65 (1967): 469-76. [See Andrew Finnell, Chaucer Review 8 (1973): 147-58, citing this as a "masterpiece of research and deduction," and on this and the article in the Robbins Festschrift of 1974 listed above, see A. C. Baugh in A Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland, 2nd ed. (1978), p. 16. Regarded as authoritative.]
"The Iconography of the Wilton Diptych." Minnesota Review 7 (1967): 342-47.
"Piers Plowman." In Evidence for Authorship: Essays on Problems of Attribution, ed. Ephim G. Fogel and David Erdman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966: 408-415.
Co-author, The Minnesota English Test. Minneapolis: Testing Bureau, University of Minnesota, 1963. [A standardized test for college English placement.]
"The Outside and the Inside: Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away." Critique 3 (1960): 11-19. Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism 21, ed. Sharon R. Gunton (Detroit: Gale, 1982): 150-52; and in Critical Essays on Flannery O'Connor, ed. Melvin J. Friedman and Beverly Lyon Clark (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1985): 85-91.
"Middlemarch: George Eliot's Masterpiece." In From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad, ed. Robert Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958: 194-207. [Reprinted, paperback, 1968.]
Co-author, Themes and Exercises. Edited, with others. Minneapolis: Department of English, University of Minnesota. 3 editions, 1957-59. [A textbook.]
_______________
Charter Member, New Chaucer Society
Member, Bibliographical Society (London)
Donor, Middle English Dictionary, New Chaucer Society
Referee, Speculum, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, National Endowment for the Humanities
BORN: Boston, Massachusetts, July 27, 1933
Boston Latin School
Harvard College: B.A., magna cum laude (English), 1954
Graduate study: University of Minnesota (English), 1954-1960
TEACHING AND ADMINISTRATIVE POSITIONS:
Graduate assistant and instructor (English), University of Minnesota, 1954-60
Instructor (English), Cornell University, 1960-64
Associate professor of English, California University of Pennsylvania, 1964-
Associate vice-president for Academic Affairs (acting), 1983-84
Interim associate dean of Liberal Arts, 1986-87
